Addiction
by x-the-rising-x
Summary: He never learned to be temperate Jack/Kate


**Title: **Addiction

**Pairing:** Jack/Kate

**Fandom: **Lost

**Rating:** R

**Warnings:** Spoilers up to 5x11 "Whatever Happened, Happened"

**Summary:** He never learned to be temperate

**A/N: **Written for **lostfichallenge**, challenge #91: _The Seven Heavenly Virtues_; temperance

Temperance (tĕm'pər-əns, tĕm'prəns):

- _Noun. _

1. practice of self-control, abstinence, and habitual moderation.

His father was a drinker, and Jack muttered over shattered glasses and the stale scent of alcohol when he was ten that he would never turn out like Christian. It was a lie – well, maybe not a lie, but a denial of the inevitable truth. We all turn into our parents. Wayne shot a bird when he was seven. Kate killed Wayne when she was 24. She wasn't surprised when she was told she had _murder _in her heart.

The first time Jack touches her (_although this must be a lie – he's touched her so many times before, intimate in a different way_) he is rough and miscalculating. The scotch, the first _real _liquor he's had in nearly four months, blurs the line for him between control and lack thereof (_to be fair, though, she's had a few glasses of wine, and the line is pretty blurred for her as well). _Jack's never fucked in a public bathroom before, and he has to wonder if the God he never believed in will forgive him for this slip up – this submission to temptation.

All it took was a black dress, a pressed suit, a bit of alcohol, and they have completely abandoned any attempt at a platonic relationship. _(These walls are all broken down now_). 108 days of vacant looks and erased words and a silent suppression of an inappropriate attraction reach their catharsis in an almost shameful way.

_Tell us about your time on the island, Dr. Shephard. Ms. Austen, have you been in contact with the father of your son? Dr. Shephard, do you plan on going back to your work? Talk to us a little bit about the pending charges against you, Ms. Austen. _Questions that bounce off the walls of the penthouse filled with reporters suffocated the survivors. At some point during the party (_why was there a party thrown for them? They weren't heroes…) _Aaron started to cry. On the verge of unwarranted tears, the new "mother" thrust the screaming baby into the arms of Sun and disappeared to the bathroom.

He followed her (_just to talk, he would try to convince himself later). _And so then, if it had just been to talk, why had he kissed her? Why then would he have her pressed up against the cold tile of the bathroom wall? Why, then, are there yells bouncing off the walls of the enclosed room, like echoes lost in the midst of a rainstorm.

---

They don't discuss it afterwards, and the next time he touches her (_It still hurts to see Aaron. It still hurts to know what my father did. But I want to try. I want this. I want you.)_, he apologizes with his fingers. Digits dance across naked flesh, red wine tracing their tongues, his hot breath sliding against her ear as he presses into her. _Again. Again. _

He can't think when he's around her.

_(Soon, he flushes away declarations and proposals and promises, instead of flushing away the pills)_

---

He's addicted to her like he's addicted to the pills (_to the whiskey)_. She slides down his throat like the bourbon does, but if he had to choose, he knows which one he'd pick in a heart beat. She moans underneath him and he thinks this is _wrong _(_and he knows his father taught him better)_, that he should have some goddamn self-control, but everything spins like how it used to, and everything is warm and safe like it used to be (_and not at all scary like it has been lately_), and he thinks maybe she's come back to him.

In the morning she sees the bottles littering his kitchen counter and she politely turns her head away.

---

"_I hate you,_" she tells him, a week after they return to the island. He can see his words from the day before burning in her pained eyes (_You didn't like the old me, Kate_), fresh and raw and blunt. She hates him like she hated his pills, or maybe because of them, and he almost considers letting her walk away.

They are in Sawyer's house, all of them, and amidst the commotion, he's the only one who hears her. And as she steps away from him, further and further away, he can feel the withdrawal beginning. It was like this with the drinking – with the drugs, too. But she's slipping out of his fingers faster than the substances ever did. His heart is pounding, head spinning, and he knows that _this is it. _

He catches her when she's halfway out of the door (_a rough hand against a soft shoulder_). "_I hate you,_" she says again, as if trying to convince herself.

"_I love you,_" he whispers, and then he is kissing her. Sawyer is watching, he's sure, as well as Juliet, Miles and Hurley, but Jack stopped caring a long time ago. Her tongue is warm against his, and he's fallen off the wagon, but it doesn't _matter, _because this is an addiction he'll never give up.

_"Have temperance,_" he learned at his first and only Sunday school lesson when he was eight.

(_Too late_).


End file.
